IN A NARROW ruling -- some would say narrow-minded -- the Virginia Supreme Court late last month declared Sharon Bottoms to be an unfit mother and gave custody of her 3-year- old son Tyler to the plaintiff, Sharon's mom. In delivering its ruling, the court harrumphed a bit about Bottoms moving from place to place a lot and being chronically short of money, but the 900-pound gorilla was the fact that she is an admitted lesbian.

It's an interesting case, to say the least, but just as interesting, and just as pause-giving, are some of the statements made in reaction to the decision. For example, there was Mike Russell, speaking on behalf of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, who praised the court's ruling for being "in keeping with mainstream Middle America's wishes."

It's hard to imagine a more unnerving prospect than a judicial system based upon mainstream Middle America's wishes, which include among other things: that Reagan was still president; that California would fall into the Pacific; that "The Brady Bunch" had never been cancelled; and that the Fourth Amendment, with its prattle about the right of the people to be secure from unreasonable intrusions and seizures, would just go away.

"If wishes were horses, beggars could ride," goes the proverb. By contrast, if wishes were laws, beggars could be packed off to internment camps where they would no longer inconvenience and discomfort mainstream Middle Americans. A lovely distinction between wishes and laws is that the latter are designed to protect us from the former.

God spare us from laws based on the wishes of a population segment that still hasn't figured out that you don't want to build huge trailer parks in tornado country.

Similarly, spokeswoman Kristi Manrick of the pro-wholesomeness Family Research Council was delighted with the decision, which she justified with a rather telling choice of words: "Common sense tells us a parent's sexual practices have a strong influence on a child." Perhaps, but shouldn't we have something a little stronger to go on than common sense -- empirical objective research, for instance -- before we begin making judicial determinations?

Human history and widespread personal experience have made it fairly clear that common sense is generally about five parts common and one part sense, and that the phrase "Common sense tells us" can be translated as "We don't really know what the hell we're talking about."

If parents' sexual practices have such a strong influence on their kids, how do you explain Madonna, or Nuns, or the fact that Newt Gingrich's sister is a lesbian activist, while Newt Gingrich is, well, Newt Gingrich? Common sense tells us that it obviously cannot always be relied on.

And if it is true that home environment, child-rearing practices, and parental lifestyle greatly influence the development of the child, then we're left with the irony that young Tyler was taken from his mother, a lesbian, and handed over to his grandmother, whose home environment, child-rearing, and lifestyle produced a lesbian. At this point, common sense ceases to inform us, and begins talking to itself.

Which brings up a final intriguing remark, made by Kay Bottoms, mother of Sharon: "She neglected this baby . . . I didn't fight her just because she turned lesbian." Not was lesbian, mind you, or even became lesbian, but turned lesbian, as in "turned to drugs" or "turned traitor" or "turned on me like some ungrateful creature after all I've done . . ."

Sharon Bottoms, raised to be everything her mom and mainstream Middle America wanted and valued, defied their wishes. and common sense tells us they'll get you for that.